GRE/LSAT Study Guide Suggestions?

I can't speak from experience, as I spent my senior year in college studying for the PBR.

But I've heard that Kaplan's stuff is pretty good. Good luck!

Screw study guides and classes. A good game (or 14) of beer pong the night before the test is all you need. And, yes, I speak from experience.

I took the KAPLAN class back in '05 during my junior year of college. While it was expensive it did offer a money back gurantee if you didn't score above your baseline on the actual exam if you did everything in the course.

I thought the class was worthwhile and the guy teaching it knew what he was talking about but for whatever reason I couldn't get thru the freakin exam and was never able to get into the mid 150s except for once.

I figure it wasn't in the cards or maybe it was a maturity issue but I figure at least I don't have to contend with $86k in debt.

And to answer your question (If you actually did have one). I scored 148 (Yeah it's a crap score compounded with a somewhat decent GPA 3.2) which was the exact score I got when I took the test with absolutely no knowledge of the exam. Effectively I failed with the best results possible.

Many of them suck and prey on the fears and anxieties of potential graduate students. Here's a webpage I made on this very subject. Though it is affiliated with a specific institution, most of the links I provide aren't. Read my little caveat at the top and then follow the appropriate links. Good luck!

Kaplan's books are no good. From what I understand they make up their own LSAT style questions... if the books don't use official test questions then stay away. If you spend enough time practicing on actual LSAT tests you will start to internalize the way the test questions work. Pseudo-LSAT questions won't give you that.

Also, and I know it's early, but don't over hydrate the day of the test. I was the only person during my exam that had to leave during a timed section to use the restroom and I did it twice! I also had to pee like a motherfucker during my reading section.

The best LSAT review course is not taking the LSAT.

Nobody in my class bothered studying for the general portion of the GRE -- in the end it was pretty straightforward and mostly a time management exercise.

For the subject specific they mostly picked the usual "classical" questions so if you had done enough problems to cover the usual suspects* then it again came down to time management.

* my field was physics so they chose the standard questions that you get on the 3rd year exams. A few things from 4th year might have snuck it but most of that stuff was supposed to be fresh anyways.

I took Kaplan for LSAT prep and found the class itself worthless. But getting access to their treasure trove of practice/previous exams was what made it worth my time (though not the price)...my suggestion if you can't get to the class, pick up a book at the store and read through their general tips for the different sections...then ebay/amazon-marketplace any books with practice exams and just dig right in and develop your own process along the way. I think you can also order sample/previous exams online, though I'm not sure where. I did tons of practice exams, never listened in class (and in fact skipped some) and did pretty well.

Good luck.

Play PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY all day, every day.

I took the GRE last year and I bought Barron's How to Prepare for the GRE with CD-ROM. I found it useful because of the practice tests in the book and the CD simulates the actual testing environment so you are relatively familiar with the format before showing up for your test.

I think it would be very unwise not to study for the general exam, especially if you've been away from school for a while. The math section consists of things like areas that I hadn't done since the 10th grade, it is all pre-pre-calculus. I guess that could be good or bad based on your background, but for me I had to relearn a lot of formulas that I would never use again post-GRE. So if I didn't review that in my prep book, I would have wasted a lot of time trying to recall/re-derive formulas come test time. I'm not sure what field you are from, but I'm computer science so my verbal didn't need to be spectacular and so I really only studied the format and didn't try to learn any new words. Somehow I managed to guess my way into pretty high verbal scores (my vocabulary is so shit). I did fine on math too, thanks to my studying, and apparently my scores weren't bad enough to stop me from getting into my current PhD program.

The contents of the Barron book didn't seem so unique that they could not be done just as well by another book, but at least you know that the material is actually useful and relevant. I chose it based on reading prep book reviews on Amazon. I'm not so sure about humanities, but for sciences, know that your scores only need to be "good enough" because the tests have little to no relevance to the work you will actually do in grad school.

I have no GRE experience, but I have TONS of LSAT info.

I took the one-month Kaplan course, and at least for me, it sucked. I originally scored a 155 on their free diagnostic exam, and after two months of self-study with my Powerscore books, I bumped it up to a 160 by the first day of class.

The LR and LG techniques they provided were needlessly confusing, and the RC tips were fairly obvious and uninspiring, but to be fair, that was my strongest section from the get-go.

I've heard that one's Kaplan experience varies widely depending on the instructor (mine sucked ass), but despite the generous discount that I got, it wasn't at all worth it.

The best study guides are those published by Powerscore. The Logic Games Bible and The Logic Reasoning Bible are fantastic workbooks that teach very effective, straightforward techniques. They also use ACTUAL LSAT questions, as opposed to the bullshit "simulated" questions that Kaplan gets away with.

My surefire way to slay the LSAT beast is to complete each of those workbooks to learn the fundamentals. By the end of each book, you should have a solid accuracy level on each of these sections. There's no book for Reading Comp, but there's not much "technique" to learn with that section anyways, compared to the other two.

The next step is to complete as many timed practice tests as possible. Once you're done with the Powerscore books, your accuracy will be solid, but you've got to turn up the heat and start timing yourself, because that additional pressure of 35 minutes per section is what kills most test takers.

One nice thing about LSAC is that (except for their experimental Feb. tests), they 've published all of their previous LSATS. You can buy them individually for like $8/ea from LSAC, but there are also three compilation books that have 10 LSATS each for like $10. I would buy at least one of those books, plus the last 3-4 published tests from this past year. I think the compilations are from the late 1990s, but the test has evolved somewhat in recent years, so practicing on the most recent tests possible is a great idea.

The current trend is that Logic Games have gotten easier, with less questions devoted to it (low 20s), while Reading Comp has gotten more difficult with more questions (high 20s). Also, they recently added an "opposing viewpoints" section to Reading Comp, so it'd be nice to try that one out BEFORE test day.

For the record, after the Powerscore books, I went through about 10-12
tests worth of material (both timed individual sections, and timed full tests), with scores averaging in the mid-160s. My practice high was 168, the last of which I scored on the June 2006 test on the eve of my Sept 2006 test date. I ended up with a 165, which was good enough to get me into Notre Dame.

donde, drop me a pm. I've got something for ya.

Oh also, LSAC changed the rules that they'll only report your highest LSAT score no matter how many times you take it. They used to report every one of them. This is without a doubt to get people to pay the fee to take multiple LSATs (and consequently, KAPLAN and Princeton review make out like thieves)....

So, if you screw up, and are up to the extra abuse, you can always take it again! Cash in on that score inflation before schools start adjusting their LSAT req'ts upwards.

I forgot that they have changed the GREs as well. I'm not sure what is different and if the Barron book has updated sufficiently.

Most definitely -- it's just that in terms of time tradeoffs (studying for exams plus the GRE) it was much better for us to focus on the subject exam given that's what the grad schools would mostly focus on anyways.

The general exam would probably hurt us only if we really bombed (which no one did) and wouldn't help us too much otherwise.

Ah, that makes sense. The subject test is for computer science is apparently almost as useless as the general test so none of the six schools I applied to made it mandatory.

The general GREs are pretty easy... well, at least as easy as the SATs/ACTs. I think the only thing that you could really "study" for is perhaps some of the quantitative stuff.

Really, just make sure you time manage well, and take some practice tests if you are still worried. From what I remember, your practice test scores fairly closely mirror what you will actually get.

LSAT, I have no idea.

Actually, LSAC will continue to report all of your test scores to the law schools. The big rule change isn't with them, but with US News & World Report. Now, they only require schools to use each student's highest scores in their median LSAT calculations, as opposed to averaging them out.

As far as USNWR is concerned, a guy who scored 165 & 175 is counted just like someone who scores a 175 in one shot, but the school will still have all that info given to it by LSAC. They'd probably hold the latter student in higher regard, but at least it won't affect their median LSAT scores if they choose the first one.